Untimed: A Time Travel Adventure

by Andy Gavin

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out of the Lord Proprietor’s palace faster.”

  She snuggles over to me. I can see a lot of thigh.

  “You could’ve flown back here with Sophie. But you didna do it.”

  “After our night in France, I’d carve off my skin with a cake spatula to get you back.” And I’m only half kidding.

  She opens her robe. “It’s just me body you want?”

  I feel my face fall.

  “Oh, Charlie. I likes t’tease you.” She rolls over so our noses almost touch. “Like I did me da’s terrier.”

  “So I’m your pet?”

  “I loved that dog. He was loyal and not a mean bone in him.”

  She kisses me on the forehead, my nose, my lips. We make out for a few minutes until she scoots back against the headboard and runs her fingers through her damp hair.

  “Was it miserable being a slave?” I ask.

  “The worst of it be that demon juice. Me head feels like a tanner’s hide, but if someone pressed an infernal juicer into me hand, I mightn’t be able t’say no.”

  “I’d smash it for you.”

  I feel her forehead, which isn’t clammy like yesterday. Then I move my hand down to her neck. She puts her hand on mine.

  “In the palace an’ last night, the juice brought me the most unholy dreams. Donnie, Billy, Ben, me folks. They comed as corpses an’ whipped the flesh from me bones.”

  Imaginary spiders crawl up my neck.

  “You don’t have to worry,” I say, “juice hasn’t been invented yet.”

  “I ain’t so sure.” She uses her toes to play with the hair on my legs. “In that hackney, the one pulled by men instead of horses, I smelled sweet smoke. It be the same.”

  Probably opium. “You promised to stay away from it.”

  She takes my hand and puts it on her belly, sliding it under the silk.

  “Distract me.”

  The only thing she has on underneath is the belt with Backstabber’s daggers.

  “Unusual girdle,” I say.

  She chuckles. “Only thing I have t’remember ’em by.” I guess she means her parents, not the Tocks.

  I tickle the soft skin of her belly.

  “Lower. Me tummy still hurts something fierce.”

  She doesn’t have to ask twice. Under my new attentions she purrs.

  “It’ll be okay now,” I say. “You saw how much Dad knows. We’ll get all the answers, figure this out.”

  She makes a sad little sound. I stop.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry.” She captures my wandering hands and presses them against her stomach. “I be thinkin’ of Billy again. How holdin’ him seems a lifetime ago. A wisp in the London fog.”

  It does feel like that. Even the steam and clockwork Philadelphia is starting to fade, becoming a place of mist and mirrors I might never see again.

  I wake with Yvaine still asleep beside me.

  Napping wasn’t my intention, but I guess it’s just as well. I leave her to sleep and go to find my father. The sun has set and the gardens are lit by red paper lanterns.

  Dad’s study looks very Chinese. He’s seated at a burgundy wood desk scribbling on a pile of paper, the shiny brass page in front of him.

  “Any progress?” I ask.

  He looks surprised to see me. “This may be a very important document. The cipher is computationally exhausting, utilizing a Lagged Fibonacci Generator, but manageable with the key.”

  “Can you teach it to me?”

  He nods. I lean over his wide shoulder as he converts each symbol into a number, runs it through a big formula, then writes down a normal letter.

  “Why is it in Latin?” I say after he works his way through the first sentence.

  He shrugs. “Maybe the Regulator wanted to use a language prevalent in history. Or perhaps he was Roman, or a medieval priest.”

  “Or a snobby English teacher.”

  He ignores me, working letter by letter. I turn my attention to a refrigerator-sized iron safe. The door is ajar, so I peek inside.

  There are stacks of silk-wrapped bundles. I peel back a bit of colored fabric to find the telltale too-sharp-for-this-world brass. More pages.

  “How’d you get so many?”

  “Your grandfather left me eight. The rest I found myself.” He never looks up from his work. No surprise there, but he hasn’t seen me in seven years — couldn’t he muster up a little more enthusiasm?

  “These are what passes for Grandpa’s cufflinks in our family?”

  “Except,” he says, “deadly machines don’t kill you over cufflinks.”

  “I saw Rapier with a page,” I say.

  That earns a glance. “Who’s Rapier?”

  “The Tick-Tock with the fencing blade in his walking stick.”

  “That one’s bad news.” He turns back to the cipher. “It’s hard to tell, but he might be in charge of the others.”

  Figures I’d have the boss-Tock on my tail.

  Dad taps the brass sheet. “Looks like your girl’s father had the page about Abraham-Louis Bréguet.”

  Yvaine’s grandfather, actually, which I might mention if he took a little interest.

  “Her name is Y—”

  “I call these pivot pages.” He helps himself from a plate of stuffed buns.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The Regulator lived a long time ago — in traveler meta-time — but he recognized that the manipulation of history was fraught with danger. He espoused a pivot or fulcrum theory, and many of his pages detail historical junctures susceptible to large-scale time manipulation. Often smart people in important situations.”

  Like Ben Franklin, source of my whale-sized guilt.

  Dad reads from the translated page in front of him, droning on about the importance of Bréguet to the development of mechanical technologies and the effect of volatile French politics on the sponsorship of his work. I’m glad he understands this stuff — that’s why I came here — but…

  “Aren’t you the least bit interested in what happened to Mom?”

  “Bréguet’s a well known pivot,” he says after a pause so brief I’m not sure it happened. “Following the big quake, I identified him as a major fulcrum for this timeline.”

  “Care to paraphrase?” I say.

  “Even in the proper history — the one you grew up with — Bréguet was regarded as the greatest watchmaker of all time. But the Tick-Tocks altered something, furthering his inventions. In this timeline, his Springtorb did for mechanical power what the dynamo did for electrical power — particularly given the reduction in electrical research created by Ben Franklin’s absence.” He pierces me with the glare-of-all-encompassing-disappointment.

  Since he won’t ask, I fill him in on the rest of France — leaving out the part where Yvaine discovers she’s the granddaughter of a major fulcrum — and Philadelphia-gone-bad.

  “Clearly I miscalculated,” he says. “Your approach for bringing Sophie here was reckless and brilliant, but if you’d studied the Regulator’s work…” He scowls, further deepening the great mystery of whether he thinks I’m wunderkind or dumbshit.

  I thumb through the pile of rice paper scrolls inside the safe. They seem to be translations of other pages. There aren’t many — just twenty-one — more a pamphlet than a book.

  “So if we travel with these copies they’ll be ruined?” I say.

  “Turned into something harmless, like contemporary poems. That’s why the invention of phase-shifted brass was so important.”

  “Let me guess. The Regulator cooked that up too.”

  My father nods. “There’s even a page about it. Unfortunately, the technique is rather unclear.”

  I find the one he’s talking about. The Regulator dude pontificates on the subject of causal-dampening and phase-shifts. Apparently, he discovered some process to make certain metals out of sync by an infinitesimal margin just like us time travelers. He calls the result te
mporal-metallics. The material is immune to time-assimilation, which I assume is his term for whatever changes phones into notebooks.

  When I look up, my father stretches his arms over his head, then offers me the plate from his desk.

  “Pork bun?” he says through a mouthful.

  I take one to humor him. It’s pretty good, like a BBQ pork sandwich made from Chinese restaurant spareribs.

  “Do any pages hide some secret for killing Tick-Tocks?” My turn with the full mouth.

  “Unfortunately not. Mostly they’re just lists of historically important people, philosophy, or technical discussions about time travel.”

  “Have you been to the far future?” I ask. “Maybe all the answers we need are just posted on the web — or whatever they have then.”

  “Only as far as 2030,” he says, “but your computer-laden future is gone, replaced by a new one. And uptime travel offers its own challenges. Sophie’s talents have their uses, believe me, but her range is limited and she’s a poor navigator to places she hasn’t been.”

  “Yvaine doesn’t have a problem with it.”

  He shrugs. I doubt the name registered. At least Mom and other normals have an excuse for not paying attention to me.

  “What is the deal with the Tick-Tocks?” I say.

  His pudgy fingers move stiffly, laying out several sheets of paper on the desk. He looks so much older — and acts it.

  “The vagaries of living in meta-time — my eight-year vacation being a case in point — make it difficult, to be sure, but the time-war seems to have started when a rogue group took the radical stance that the consequences of time manipulation on normals were irrelevant. These manipulators, as I call them, altered history, creating a future where mechanical technology was paramount. The Tick-Tock future. During the ensuing conflict the original timeline was restored, but some Tick-Tocks survived, remnants of a time that time itself forgot.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Then they want to go home too?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  I’d sympathize if they weren’t inhuman killing machines. And while my dad might be a brilliant scholar and I’m just a talented upstart, it’s obvious that the Tocks are big fans of the Regulator’s work, just like Dad. That, plus knowing we travelers basically made the Tocks possible…

  “These pivot pages seem pretty dangerous,” I say. “Are you sure they’re not a how-to guide for changing the timeline?”

  “The Regulator wrote them as cautionary instructions,” he says. “As in how to avoid letting America’s founding fathers get killed.”

  “If you’d warned me, I’d have known better,” I say. “You’re supposed to be the parent here, right?”

  He finally looks up. “We all have to take responsibility for our actions.”

  I toss the page I’m holding back in the safe. “Don’t you think it’s possible that this Regulator might not be what you think he is?”

  “The pages make clear that the Tick-Tocks are nemesis to those with the hubris to alter time.” He looks pissed, but at least he’s paying attention. “Travelers observe, Charlie. They don’t change!”

  “Except when their daddies don’t tell them they’re travelers, and — forget it. So what’s your brilliant plan to save Mom and Ben?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” He stands up. “Man is not God. Research and understanding are the key, not impulsive, and quite possibly suicidal, action. When Sophie recovers, we all travel to Rendezvous D: Giza Egypt, under the Sphinx’s nose, New Year’s Eve, 1886. My investigations indicate a cache of pages buried nearby.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m afraid the timeline must remain as you left it.”

  He can’t be serious! But he is. I’m so mad there’s no telling what I might say if I stick around.

  I slam the door on the safe and walk out.

  Chapter Thirty:

  Dinner

  Shanghai, Summer, 1955

  YVAINE AND I SLEEP SO LATE we have to rush to get dressed for the mid-afternoon über-dinner I’m dreading. I’m not just mad at Dad, which I’ve been plenty of times, I’m really disappointed in him, a much less familiar feeling. He and I used to argue, but this is bullshit. And Sophie isn’t allowed out of bed, so she won’t be there to smooth out his butthead tendencies.

  “If the pock-marked old lady’s tofu is too spicy,” my dad says after we’re seated, “try the crab in garlic and ginger.”

  The table is big enough for twelve, round with a lazy susan in the middle, just like in an American Chinese restaurant. As big as it is, there’s barely room for all the food. Yvaine sits beside me, holding a chopstick in each fist like a toddler holds crayons. She pokes at something with the consistency of Jell-O.

  “Isn’t the duck blood wonderful, child?” Master Li asks.

  She thrusts both chopsticks upright into her rice bowl and uses her fingers to grab a drumstick from a tiny chicken apparently sliced by Freddy Krueger.

  Dad frowns and Master Li watches Yvaine’s hand like it’s a roach in the kitchen.

  “What’s this?” She’s tugging at the bird.

  “Chicken without sexual life,” Master Li whispers, his face about the same color as the rice.

  Yvaine shrugs and chomps down on her drumstick.

  “Chopsticks,” my father says, “are left upright in bowls only at funerals.”

  I snag Yvaine’s and lay them beside her bowl.

  “Enough with the Chinese etiquette lessons,” I say. “Let’s talk about how we screwed up history. I can’t believe you’re just going to let Mom rot uptime. And what about Ben Franklin?”

  “I’m not the one who left him to die in a burning church,” Dad says.

  “It’s not like we had a choice!” Master Li frowns at me and I lower my voice. “We were trapped behind the altar with a collapsing roof and an angry Tick-Tock, no escape in sight.”

  “Charlie be spot on,” Yvaine says. “If there’d been even a wee chance, I’d have stayed.”

  “You should have told me,” Dad says.

  “I did. Guess you weren’t listening.”

  It goes right past him, far as I can tell.

  “After the big quake I researched the new timeline,” he says. “In this present, there is only marginal documentation from Benjamin Franklin’s Boston childhood. As to the Philadelphia printer, the brilliant satirist, the great scientist, the master statesman, the editor of the Declaration and the Constitution, and perhaps most important, America’s advocate in France? Nothing.” A pause for effect. “Although no known Regulator page mentions him, clearly he’s a major pivot.”

  His know-it-all tone coming on top of everything else heats my blood hotter than the tea the waiter’s pouring.

  “Can I get a real drink?” Yvaine asks him. “Ale or gin?”

  My dad glares at her. “Alcohol encourages a loss of self-control and mistakes no time traveler can afford — like having a fulcrum’s baby.”

  Yvaine scowls. “A fulwhat?”

  Dad pulls an eyeball out of a whole fish and pops it in his mouth.

  Yvaine pulls a knife out of her belt and spears a dumpling.

  Master Li pulls himself together. “Child, cutlery may be used tableside in the West, but in the Middle Kingdom all food is sliced in the kitchen.”

  Yvaine freezes, but only for a moment. With the rapt attention of me, my dad, and Mr. Li, she pops the dumpling in her mouth — then jabs the blade into the tabletop.

  Master Li shrieks. “That table belonged to a eunuch serving the Ching Kanxi Emperor!”

  Yvaine grins. “This dirk belonged to Backstabber. An’ now it be mine!”

  My father gasps. “You took it from a Tick-Tock?”

  This is my first good look at the knife. It’s about ten inches long total, a third hilt. Both handle and blade look to be made of brass, and inside the handle is a sea of tiny Tick-Tock gears. The whole thing looks extra sharp — not just the blade, it has that in-focus look peculiar to time travelers, Tocks, and the
pages.

  “I think the daggers are made of temporal-metallics,” I say, “like the Regulator’s pages.”

  My father leans forward. “Can I see?”

  Yvaine glares at him.

  I put my hand on her leg. “He might be hen-hearted, but he’s no prig,” I say, hoping Dad isn’t up on his Cockney slang.

  Yvaine slides the blade over.

  My father shows it to Master Li. “What’s in my hand?”

  The old man looks confused. “An English butter knife?”

  “Almost a foot long?” Dad says.

  “I’m not sure.” Master Li’s brows furrow. “Would you like another order of the husband and wife’s sliced lung?”

  “Take the blade from me,” my father says.

  “I’ll request a new set of chopsticks if you need them,” Master Li says.

  Dad turns to me, spreads his hands, and smiles big.

  “See! Far out of phase and showing a high level of casual-damping. All phase-shifted matter, including us and Tocks, does to some degree. I’m sure you observed that normals never even notice when Tick-Tocks brandish arms.” He presses something on the knife handle.

  CHING. The gears inside the hilt whirl and the blade collapses into the base. He presses the button again, and — CHING! — the blade is back. He looks at Yvaine and smiles, not the big smile but the sweet smile. You don’t see that one very often.

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me keep this to examine?” he says.

  She hasn’t taken her eyes off the dagger for an instant.

  “It’s mine,” she says between clenched teeth.

  CHING. My father retracts the blade and hands it to her. She plays with the switch herself a few times, then draws the other blade and does the same.

  I look at the weapons and sigh. There are two of them, and we could each take one. But I know better than to ask.

  “The Regulator invented the special pages, right?” I say. “Don’t the daggers seem awfully similar?”

  My dad frowns. “As I said, all phase-shifted matter.”

  Yvaine flags down a servant and he brings her a small bottle of clear liquid on a tray. She takes a swig.